Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill..

I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order-of feeling as well as argument-to a poem. But a….

No poem should be an urn to contain a meaning, but a net to catch what meanings float through the day..

The best criticism is the sort that tells you what you already know but had been reluctant to accuse yourself of..

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironi….

To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves..

At least since Darwin's day, we have known that all of us originally emerged from the sea. That fact may account for our abiding fascination with it,….